The three men convicted in the Shakti Mills gangrape case told the Bombay High Court Thursday that the death penalty awarded to them by the sessions court in 2014 was a "savage sentence" and violated their right to life. The trio, through their lawyer, told the high court the death sentence violated their fundamental right to life guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution.

The convicts, Vijay Jadhav, Kasim Bengali and Salim Ansari, represented by senior counsel Yug Chaudhry, argued that the death sentence awarded to them was wrong in law since there existed an "enormous difference between the harm caused" by them and "the punishment" mated out to them. Chaudhry made the arguments before a bench of Justices B P Dharamadhikari and Revati Mohite-Dere that began the final hearing Thursday on the writ petitions filed by the convicts challenging the death sentence awarded to them under section 376 (E) of the IPC. In April 2014, a sessions court here held five persons guilty in the August 2013 gang-rape case in Mumbai, which had caused a national outrage. One of them, Siraj Khan, was sentenced to life imprisonment, while a second accused, a minor, was sent to a correctional facility.